That Which Survives: A 3rd Doctor ShortTrip
by That-Other-Doctor
Summary: Set immediately after "The Invasion of the Dinosaurs" with references to Barry Lett's "The Paradise of Death." Something remained after Sarah and the Doctor's mission to Parakon. Something that unites the two of them in ways they never wanted.


_With all the strength of her insane courage, she brought down her clasped fists on the exact spot at the base of Tragan's skull. But instead of obediently collapsing on the floor, he leapt to his feet, tore off the headset, and seized her by the arms._

_'You little vixen,' he hissed, his swollen face inches from hers. Dragging her across to the wall, he snapped the manacles hanging there onto her wrists._

_'No more "fun," ' he snarled, pulling a multi-tailed whip from the rack. 'It's time you were taught a lesson!'_

_— _The Paradise of Death _by Barry Letts_

* * *

Though I was making a right show of shoving my fists into my earholes and whole-heartedly refusing to pay attention to the Doctor's nattering on about some place called Florana, I was smiling enough to give the Cheshire Cat pause for thought.

Happiness is a state of mind that can't be squandered. It doesn't crop up very often, and when it does, you have to be careful not to fritter it away on small pleasures that come and go like thunderstorms in the summer, burning bright for the briefest of moments before leaving nothing but a memory and the sound of drums fading in the distance. If happiness was lightning, flashing and brilliant, then the Doctor was the storm.

I never wasted a smile on a man like him, because there really are no men like him. I feigned indignation at his imperiousness, his alien mannerisms, but my heart was always laughing.

That was the curious thing about the Doctor: he was so utterly absorbed in the details concerning one odd thing or another that his enthusiasm was catching. He could make armies turn on a dime and stamp away with a few choice words and a knowing grin. And though I could fool myself into thinking I was much too mature to stand for his errant nonsense, it's all my efforts added up to in the end: fooling. A part of me reveled in his free spirit, in his devil-may-care attitude about everything from time to tyranny to Tyrannosaurus rex. There was a child buried within the creases of his patrician face, the breathless romanticism of D'Artagnan whirling about in his blue eyes. He was composed of something that I pretended to empathize with . . . but really just didn't understand at all. He was greater than the sum of his parts, and all the more magical because of it.

He was a mass of contradictions: young of heart – beg pardon, hearts – and sprite of body, but so old the sheer scale of years made my knees knock. He was forever telling me wondrous tales of places like Metebelis III and Florana and the Eye of Orion and Paris of the 1920s, but had been unable to find the callousness within himself to sever his ties with the Brigadier and UNIT. His eyes twinkled like newborn stars and broken stained glass in the moonlight, but were shadowed by a weight of years and a sadness too heavy and too deep to put to words.

That was the Doctor, and summing him up was like being asked to put a lid on imagination, or halt the march of time.

As I said, I couldn't help but smile as he yammered away in his lab at the UNIT headquarters in London: Florana this and Florana that and Florana _hi-ho the dairy-o_. He knew perfectly well I couldn't make hide nor hair of his gaff and wonderful nonsense, but I still loved to hear him say it. He was a bard, his stories songs to the ears.

"Have I convinced you yet, m'dear?" asked the Doctor from just over my left shoulder. He was close enough for me to feel the delighted smile on his lips.

"What about the word 'no' doesn't register in that brain of yours?" I retorted half-heartedly, knowing full well that I would take up his offer but unwilling to stoke his already inflated ego. My stubborn streak refused to yield.

The Doctor's grin creased the corners of his mouth into a web of tiny wrinkles. His third incarnation always did have a very nice smile.

He wheedled away at me like a particularly determined woodchuck. "What would I have to do to change your mind?"

My hands finally left my ears and I cocked an eyebrow conspiratorially. "I could murder a cup of tea."

"I think I may have just the thing!" He leapt to his impressive height and gestured to the TARDIS. "I happened across an old man living in a small village called Hou Keng in the Anhui Province a few lifetimes ago. Splendid chap, very stimulating conversationalist and an excellent cross-stitcher . . . introduced me to a wonderful blend of Taiping Houkui tea . . ."

He was utterly immersed in memories of places and faces even my over-active imagination couldn't match in incredibility. He grasped my wrist to take me into his incongruous old police box, back to the nonsense, back through the looking glass, but I recoiled from his touch with a yelp of pain. He dropped my hand as if it were a hot poker.

"Sorry, sorry," I muttered, "my wrist twinges a bit." I pulled my sleeves up until they covered the palms of my hands.

The Doctor stared at me, eyebrows furrowed, finger working a little rut under his lip. "I barely touched you."

"It's not your fault, honestly. I must have bruised it at some point."

I could tell from the expression on his face that he didn't believe a word of it. I had to admit, as far as lies go, it was botched at best.

"Let me see your wrists," ordered the Doctor in a manner that brooked no argument.

"Really, Doctor, it's nothing—"

"_Sarah_."

I bit my lip. I noticed that his long hands hung at his sides, and he made no move to touch me again. For some reason, I felt as though he didn't have to.

I rolled up the sleeves on the blue jumpsuit given to me by the Golden Age buffoons on their fake space flight, revealing a ribbon of angry welts blistering the skin of both my wrists. The wounds were bruising to an alarming shade of violet; they burned and ached in equal measure as the cold air of the lab stung them. I had to bite my tongue against fresh shivers of pain shooting up my arms until they buried themselves right in the nerve center of my brain. I noticed that the Doctor's face had gone alarmingly waxen.

"Good grief," he said, "where on Earth . . ."

"Not on Earth," I corrected him, "Parakon."

The Doctor shot me a look that made me want to hide my head in the corner of the lab, dunce cap and all. "You've had these wounds since Parakon and it never occurred to you to tell me?"

"We were busy. Dinosaurs in London, rogue government officials, Mike's betrayal . . . it all became rather distracting."

"Poppycock. I _am_ rather good with time, you know. I would have seen you to rights."

I chuckled. "No doubt."

"Does it hurt?"

"Ah, no," I breezed, "bloody agony, actually. Feels like my wrists are being skinned with an apple peeler."

The Doctor bade me hold my arms out, and I did dutifully. He brought his hands up and gently touched the surface of one of the welts. I gasped, but didn't pull away. As he studied my wounds, I noticed his eyes fog over and darken. The gears turning in that vast mind of his were beyond my reckoning, but I wondered what he was thinking.

"A penny for them?" I asked.

The Doctor didn't look up from his examinations. Out of nowhere, I imagined him with a pair of half-moon granny spectacles perched on the tip of his beaky nose, and the image made me giggle.

Oddly enough, he didn't return my humor. If nothing else, his mood seemed to sour even more.

"Parakon, you say?"

I pursed my lips in bemusement, but answered simply, "Yes."

"Did Tragan do this to you, Sarah?"

I should have been expecting the question. The Doctor's eyes were as dark as my memories of that name, memories of being lashed to a chair, brought within a centimeter of a gun barrel, feeling the caresses of a whip, hearing words that froze my blood stiff and made my skin crawl with more fear than I believed a woman was capable of feeling.

_'How far do I have to go before she begs me for a kiss? Starts screaming? Dies?'_

Tragan's words were blades of ice in my mind, and the cowardice and fear with which I'd faced him still made me redden with shame.

"Yes," I told the Doctor, my voice thick behind an unexpected knot in my throat, "Tragan did this to me."

"When?" he demanded.

"After Chairmen Freeth had taken you to face combat with Jaeger or Jenhegger or whatever the hell his name was. He left me with Tragan, as assurance I guess."

"And that's when he did this to you?" The Doctor's voice was very quiet. His fingers brushed like feathers over the burns. His icy skin should have hurt, but it didn't.

"Well," I had the grace to look a little sheepish, "I tried to escape, you see."

The Doctor finally raised his head again. He told me with words clipped and sharp as flint, "That was a very stupid thing to do."

I puffed my chest out indignantly. "I was trying to help you!"

"By antagonizing that sadist?" The Doctor upbraided, "Jumping Jehosephat, Sarah, I took you to be a woman with an inkling of intelligence in her head."

I said something very rude. The Doctor just pouted and muttered, "I most certainly am not!"

"Tell me, how was I to know any better?" I demanded. "For all I knew, you were already dead and had had your head skewered on a pike for all and sunder to admire!"

"I would have managed quite well on my own!"

"And do you know what? You're probably right!" I said angrily, "In the thirty seconds I spent chained to a wall waiting for Tragan to flog me to death, you had probably already breezed past that Jenhegger fellow with some of your Venusian whatsit, overthrew the Corporation, and invited the President to a game of Scrabble and tiddlywinks!"

"But I still lived with the doubt, Doctor. I still thought Freeth had sent you out there to die, and had to while away the time with the knowledge that I could do nothing to stop the inevitable. There was a chance you had saved the day against all overwhelming opposition, yes, but more likely you were hanging above the precipice, waiting to die alone and afraid and humiliated. How could I just stand by and let that happen? How could I just abandon you?"

The Doctor insisted, "Sarah, the skin of your wrists has been burnt by a slow-corroding _acid_. It must have been lined in the metal of the cuffs Tragan used. Do you have any idea what lengths men like him are capable of going? Do you know what he could have done to you?"

I shivered. "Yes. The possibilities . . . had crossed my mind at the time."

"Then why do it?" The Doctor asked me earnestly, "Why risk such a terrible, terrible fate? For me, a man whom you barely know."

I met his eyes, and still couldn't make sense of what was going on behind them. Ignoring the aching blisters on my wrist, I reached out a hand and placed my palm on his chest, on the bony space between his two hearts. His velvet jacket crushed under my fingers, his heartsbeat echoed down my arm.

"Do you feel this?" I whispered.

He looked at me uncomprehendingly, confusion breaking that insufferable screen behind his gaze.

"This," I affirmed, "is what I feel, the Brigadier feels, John Benton feels, every person who's ever cared for you feels every single damn time you challenge a guard to a duel, or offer to rewire a computer through your own brain, or make us just stand there and watch in horror as you try to right every bloody wrong in the entire universe on your own. This confusion, this emptiness, this big ol' resounding _'Why?' _is what drove me to attack Tragan and try to save your neck. All rational thought goes on vacation somewhere sunny and nice when a friend's life is in danger, but desperation is that which survives. And Doctor . . . you're the one man in my life who has succeeded time and time again in making me _very_ desperate."

The Doctor had taken a profound interest in his hands. He didn't say a word to me, just rubbed the knuckles on his artist's fingers and kept his enigmatic thoughts to himself. I considered him: blue smoking velvet coat, ruffled shirt just beginning to crinkle, a puff of snowy white hair that lit up in the confines of the lab like a cotton ball under a floodlight. He had a face that could have passed him off as my father, but in that moment I thought he looked very small and alone. The child hidden under his patrician features had begun to weep a little. It was doing its very best to keep itself to itself, but I could see through the mask clear enough.

It was easy to spot because it was the expression I wore as well, a sinking emptiness beneath the surface that splintered open at the possibility of someone you love going away and never coming back. Both the Doctor and I wore our masks, but I like to think, underneath of them, in our shared desperation, we found something more than that which survives: that which endures.

And let's face it, I would never stop trying to save him. Nor he I.

"Come on," the Doctor hooked a thumb over his shoulder towards the first-aid kit on the counter, "let's get you patched up."

Happiness is a rare thing, but I knew I wasn't squandering it with the Doctor. And I realized . . . I never would.


End file.
